


The mechanics of now

by sarensen



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Dealing with disability, M/M, Morphine, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, emotional breakdown, mention of medicinal drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 12:58:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6908191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarensen/pseuds/sarensen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-movie. Erik comes to Charles in the hospital.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The mechanics of now

**Author's Note:**

> _"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."_ – Albert Einstein

Everything is blue. Blue, and soft edges and muffled sound. But no, not blue. He's looking through his eyes the wrong way, outside-in. Like a face outside the window, like feet with fingers, like drunk sex against the stairs. His world is a Gaussian blur of impulse. He wants to go inside again, he thinks, back inside his head. If there is an inside to the blue world.

The empty space next to him makes a sound like feathers. The empty space inside him makes no sound at all; it's the absence of a goodbye, the dead sound under water. Something tastes like coconut in his mouth.

He pushes. With only a little effort the world warps and he's right-way-round again, right-side-up, not blue anymore, but something's missing. Something's wrong. Synapses wriggle like worms.

It takes a while for him to think anything concrete, but he's quite sure he's not alone in this not-blue world. There's a sound, his constant companion. Beep, it goes. Beep, it sings, sometimes short, sometimes long, always the same. He thinks he might be scared, bewildered, confused. He feels like he's forgetting something, but that something could be everything that's ever been important to him. It has a name, one he can't quite put his finger on.

He's in the not-blue for days before things start making sense again. He stares at the ceiling a lot; the ceiling is white-safe, distant and separate from the bullet that took his legs. He's quite sure the steady beeping from the wall can't be monitoring his heart, for the simple reason that his heart's been broken. But he doesn't know when. He doesn't know why, nor by whom.

He starts putting together the facts like a puzzle, when the morphine lets him. When it doesn't, he lets the blue take him, drifting on the sea of pleasant nothing like a balloon.

And one day he remembers the name. It stares back at him in the mirror, a smile that cuts. 

Not his face. Not his anything.

He tears his eyes away from the mirror, and regards his toothbrush for a long time. It looks familiar, but it does not feel like it belongs to him. Everything is different. His clothes feel like someone else's clothes. Time feels like someone else's time. He wonders if it's possible to be so irrevocably changed that his very reality now belongs to someone else. If Einstein was right, it is. Then none of this realness is real.

"Erik," he murmurs, and then time dissolves and morphine blues his eyes and takes away the burning brand his spine has become.

He sees faces, hears voices, a sort of blurred cloud of other people and doctors, who are not quite people. Their minds are like streetlamps in the dark, too bright and surrounded by the austere buzz of too much electricity running through too small a space.

And despite his academic knowledge of the way things _are_ , he still has moments when he forgets, when he thinks those useless legs are still his and not someone else's. 

How inconvenient.

He wakes to the feeling of a hand squeezing his, fingers curling around his palm. With a clarity he hasn't known in weeks he can feel they're warm, strong fingers. He can't see in the dark, but he doesn't need to. He'd know those hands anywhere.

"I'm so... I'm so sorry," comes the broken whisper in the dark, "Charles."

Charles lets the silence between words sink into his head, quiet breathing, the rustle of a shirt. He wonders, "Are you real?"

Erik kisses him.

A million possibilities and all their alternate universes collide in that kiss. Every inevitable conclusion of every conceivable choice they could have made in the past will have lead them here, even in the not-real realness Charles lives in now. A world of blue inside a world of black and shadows, and Erik's warm hands are picking Charles up and holding him, holding him like a child while Charles cries like something no longer whole. 

He should hate Erik. He does hate Erik, but where Erik is concerned, he thinks, maybe the word means something different now, an Einstein-reality of not-hate, not-blue clouds of hope, where the constant motion of their mouths and hands and bodies can be measured, but not observed. Quantum theory governs the world outside Erik's helmet.

Erik tells him, "I never wanted this."

Charles hears, "Despite your best intentions, what we had was not good enough."

Maybe it means, "I loved you anyway."

In the morning Erik is gone, leaving a hollow in the mattress and a lingering sense of happiness and contentment that are all the more sweet because they have no place in Charles' not-real world.

Someone else's bed and someone else's sheets. Someone else's curtains sweep a slow waltz against the floor, someone else's gaunt face reflects in the window. But Erik's smell lingers on the pillow, and this, Charles knows, is _his_. This is his real. 

For the first time in weeks, he smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> In the process of moving all my works over to AO3.  
> This was originally posted on Livejournal here: http://sarensen.livejournal.com/2663.html


End file.
